August 9, 2020

“O man of little faith, why did you doubt?” (Matthew 14:31b)

The crowd-gathering religions today, as well as in Jesus’ day, are for the most part satisfied with the spectacular and the fantastic, the walking-on-water, feeding-the-five-thousand, healing the sick, turning-water-into-wine aspects of religion, and there appears to be little relationship between that and the “faith of our fathers, living still, in spite of dungeon, fire, and sword.”

Jesus was in the process of creating and nourishing faith in the disciples, the kind of faith that stirs up the daring within the soul, that goes beyond the limits of what is reasonable and rational, and flirts with the risk of new ventures, that turns its back upon one’s well-laid plans for future security and well-being, and dares to tread the fringe of danger for the benefit of others. It is a vibrant, living, daring, sacrificial faith, a faith that does not burn out, that does not falter when one begins to sink beneath the waters, but lays hold afresh on the proclaimed and dramatized saving love and grace of God and rises again to joy and service.

“We gotta believe” – not in some vague, positive-thinking type of religion, or in a god who titillates us on demand, but in the God of our fathers, our Lord and Christ, who created and redeemed us and made us His own, who provides us with all we need to be what He would have us to be and do what He would have us to do. We must believe and act like it – not only in spite of evidences, but in scorn of consequences.

May God grant us the “faith of our fathers,” that we also “will be true to Thee till death.”